On Tuesday, February 8,
between 7:05 and 7:25 host Mary Lou Finlay of the CBC
Radio program As
It Happens
interviewed journalist D. D. Guttenplan about the
British historian David Irving's libel suit against
the American professor, Deborah Lipstadt.

As it Happens (AIH): In a
libel suit like no other, David Irving has filed suit
against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books. Mr. Irving is
the controversial British historian, a man who believes the
death toll in the Holocaust is grossly exaggerated. Deborah
Lipstadt is an American Holocaust scholar. She's been sued
for calling Irving a "Holocaust denier." Those are the bare
bones of the case. But observers say that what's unfolding
in a London courtroom is nothing less than a trial of the
Holocaust itself.

D. D. Guttenplan has been
following the trial and his report on the case is the cover
story in the current Atlantic Monthly magazine. He joined us
from our London studio.

Mr. Guttenplan, what is exactly the issue here? What did
Deborah Lipstadt say about David Irving
[picture] in her
book?

DDG: Well, in her book, which is called Denying the
Holocaust, she calls
Irving
"one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust
denial." Now, Irving says that those words are libellous and
he's filed suit against Deborah Lipstadt and against her
publisher in England, Penguin Books.

AIH: And of course in England the burden of proof is on
her in a libel case, is it? How does that work?

DDG: That's right. Unlike some of your listening audience
in the United States will be used to hearing the burden of
proof being on the ...

AIH: The plaintiff!

DDG: ...The plaintiff in a libel trial. In England and, I
believe, in Canada as well, the burden of proof is on the
defendant. So. She has to prove, essentially, three things.
She has to prove that certain events happened; that the
evidence existed that Irving should have been aware of that
these things happened; and that he distorted or suppressed
evidence. I mean, that's essentially insofar as the
Holocaust itself is an issue, and it is an issue in this
trial -- that is why it's an issue.

AIH: That's a pretty heavy burden, isn't it?

DDG: Well, it is a pretty heavy burden and, in a sense, a
British libel court is a pretty bad place to try and prove
these things because the record of British libel courts on
matters of history is not fantastic. On the other hand, so
far her team has been doing a very good job.

AIH: All right. Tell us a little about David Irving. What
does he believe about the Holocaust -- if you know?

DDG: Well [laughs]. I'm glad you put it like
that. His statements on the Holocaust have a kind of
quicksilver quality. He's perfectly capable of saying -- as
he has to me -- 90 percent of what they're, meaning the
defence experts, are going to say I'm going to agree with.
Just this afternoon [February 8], at the trial, they
were taking evidence from a Professor Christopher Browning,
who's a professor of history at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill. And they were talking about two of
the Nazi death camps -- Belzec and Treblinka. And Irving was
saying... Well, first he was appearing to say that he didn't
deny that Jews were killed in large numbers, in other words,
hundreds of thousands, at these camps. But then he appeared
to suggest that, well, actually, he himself wasn't
convinced, but for the sake of making the trial quicker he'd
concede that it was true. I mean, even under oath, even in a
trial, it's still very difficult to get him to be specific
about what it is he believes. He has been specific about
what he doesn't believe. What he doesn't believe is that
Jews were murdered at Auschwitz in gas chambers in large
numbers.

AIH: But he has been, I mean, he began ... he's not a
historian by training, I gather. But ...

DDG: He's not a historian by training, but, although, as
he frequently says, neither was Herodotus or Thucydides. So.
You don't have to have a PhD to be a historian.

AIH: And, in fact, some noted historians, as you point
out in your article, like Hugh Trevor-Roper, have called him
... Was he the one who said, "He's not only a Fascist
historian, but a great historian of Fascism?"

DDG: No, that was Christopher Hitchens in Vanity
Fair.

AIH: OK. Oh, all right.

DDG: But Gordon Craig of Stanford says that... he pays
tribute to Irving's energy as a researcher and to the scope
and vigour of his publications. And John Keegan, who's the
author of The Face of Battle, and other books on military
history, has said that Irving's work is "indispensable to
understanding the Second World War in the round."

AIH: So. How much weight is to be given to his historical
research?

DDG: Well. That's one of the questions at issue in the
trial, in a way. I mean, up until now Irving has had a kind
of an interesting ride, facing two ways. In other words,
facing to the community of historians, he's been regarded as
a documents man, industrious, somebody who likes to winkle
things out of archives. And, meanwhile, his growing sort of
camp of fellow ... they call themselves "revisionists" --
Lipstadt calls them "Holocaust deniers" -- he's been their
most respectable spokesperson. And one of the questions that
the trial will address, and does address directly, is
whether you can face both ways at once like that. In other
words, the defence isn't just saying David Irving is wrong
about the Holocaust, although they are saying that, they're
also saying -- and next week they'll be hearing evidence on
this -- that he has distorted or suppressed or misused
evidence all the way along through his career. In other
words, from his first book, The Destruction of Dresden,
which was published in the early 60s, up until now, he's
always been, as they say in Britain, "bent."

AIH: But if you... you've just said that he will admit
that hundreds of thousands, perhaps - we're not talking
"millions" (so that's obviously a problem) of Jews were
deliberately killed by Hitler or Hitler's people. Then he is
by definition a Holocaust denier, isn't he?

DDG: Well [pause]. That is a good question. I
mean, he would say that he concedes that, for example, I
mean, as he has at the trial, probably over a million. I
mean, it's hard to get him pinned down on numbers; probably
over a million Jews were killed on the Eastern Front by the
Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that the Nazis sent
in behind their troops during the invasion of the Soviet
Union. And he's never disputed that vast numbers of Jews
were killed by these groups, which would be hard to do
because we have the groups' reports on how many they've
killed. I mean, there's a very good paper trail for this.
But what he's said is that these killings were not
systematic and that they were not planned or ordered by
Hitler. Now in the course of the trial he's appeared to
backtrack on both of those assertions. But, in a sense, he's
all along... what he's all along denied is the existence of
large-scale homicidal gas chambers. Now, some people may say
-- "Well, so what?" I mean, if somebody's killed, you know,
a million people...

AIH: ... They're killed.

DDG: ...They're killed. But, you know, there is an
argument, a serious argument, that says that what makes the
Holocaust different from other mass murders, 'cause we've
had plenty of mass murder in this century -- or the past
century, unfortunately, is precisely its mechanized,
industrial quality.

AIH: Why does he deny that there were gas ovens?
[sic]

DDG: Why -- or what are his grounds?

AIH: What are his grounds?

DDG: I think Why is in some ways the more interesting
question. I'll answer that first, if I might, even though
you sort of didn't ask it. You know, if you argue in favour
of Fascism, if you say that, after all, all the Germans were
doing were fighting the Russians and that we know that the
Russians were these evil communists and therefore the
Germans were actually, in a sense, on our side -- and
there's a strain of right-wing thinking that argues that way
-- you have a problem. And the problem is that the most
vivid association that most people have with Fascism is gas
chambers and the Holocaust. So if you want to rehabilitate
Fascism as an ideology, then you have to do something to
attack this association. So, that, I think, is The Why. The
"on what grounds" -- because there is not the same kind of
paper trail for the death camps; the death camps that were
solely devoted to killing Jews -- Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka
-- were destroyed by the Nazis as they retreated from the
Red Army and also were liberated from the Red Army... by the
Red Army. In other words, they were captured by Russian
troops. The pictures that were all seen of, you know,
British Tommies or American GIs handing out chocolates or
strolling among the cadavers at a place like Belsen or
Buchenwald or Dachau -- those were not death camps.

AIH: They did not have ovens?

DDG: They were concentration camps. They did not have gas
chambers. They may have "ovens," i.e., crematoria, in some
cases, but people died of typhus, they died of starvation,
they died of overwork. But they were not, in the phrase that
Irving disputes, "factories of death." In other words, no
reputable historian now pretends that they were "factories
of death." And yet, if you ask a lot of people, including --
I have to say -- myself, before I started looking at this
trial, there hasn't been that sharp differentiation in the
public mind. So that, when Irving says "Well, these places
weren't 'factories of death,' therefore, no place was a
factory of death" -- you know, for half a second, people
think, "Well, how do I know this?"

AIH: What evidence is there for the gas chambers?

DDG: Well, that was last week, and the week before, the
court heard from Prof. Robert Jan Van Pelt, who's a
professor at the architecture faculty at the University of
Waterloo, in Canada. And he's the author of a book called
Auschwitz 1290 to the Present. And he presented in really
staggering detail the kind of evidence that there is, that
we now have. This evidence hasn't always been available. And
some of it was only released by the Soviet Union who held it
in their archives after, you know, the dissolution of the
Soviet Union. It was only released by the Russian archivists
in the last few years. But there are architectual
blueprints, there are plans, there are purchase orders for
Zyklon B, which is the gas that was used to kill the Jews.
So, there is, in fact, a lot of evidence. But it is also
true, and has to be said, some of the evidence -- now
whether Irving would say most of it, most other people would
say almost none of it, but nonetheless some of it, has to be
conceded, can be interpreted two ways.

AIH: How else do you interpret it?

DDG: Well, he claims, for example, --or he now claims --
'cause I should say he has said there were never any gas
chambers at Auschwitz.

AIH: Yes?

DDG: Now he says, "Well, yes, I see the plans for gas
chambers at Auschwitz, but they were for gassing corpses,
they were for gassing cadavers. Now, so why you would want
to gas a cadaver before you burn it -- as my 9-year-old son
asked me [laughs] -- is a question that I can't
answer.

AIH: Tell us a little bit about Deborah Lipstadt, the
defendant in this trial.

DDG: She's an American historian, born in New York. Her
first book was called Beyond Belief, and it was an account
of the press accounts of the Holocaust as it was going on.
In other words, why was so little reported and who reported
and what was said and why was it not believed. She's now the
Dora Professor of Jewish Studies (I think it is) at Emory
University. She has made a speciality of "Holocaust denial,"
as she calls it, and wrote a book about it in the
mid-90s.

AIH: But lots of people have attacked, over the years,
David Irving for his views. The question of whether he's a
Holocaust denier is, as we've been talking about, in one
sense, is just indisputable. He wouldn't quibble with it
himself although... He quibbles with the term, doesn't
he?

DDG: The whole trial is about "quibbling" about it.

AIH: Yeah, yeah. But he's almost made a career out of
defending people who were called Holocaust deniers and what
not.

DDG: I think that's reasonable.

AIH: So. Why has he picked on her? And why?... Her book
came out in 1994?

DDG: Yes.

AIH: Why her, and why now?

DDG: That's a very good question. You have to go back to
1996, which is two years after her book came out, when there
was an uproar in the United States because David Irving was
under contract to St. Martin's Press in New York to publish
a book called Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich. And,
shortly, before the book was about to be published, the
publishers came under a large pressure campaign, basically,
saying, "What you doing publishing this guy?" And they
dropped the book. And as a result of that campaign, and
their dropping the book, and Irving's response to the
campaign, he has essentially become a pariah to respectable
publishers. So he says... In a sense, this is true, that he
had no choice but to try and vindicate himself. The problem
is that his means of vindicating himself is basically to
continue to dig himself deeper into the same hole.

AIH: What do you mean?

DDG: Well, in other words, he's not saying, "Oh, it's
terrible to say that I'm a Holocaust denier -- I never said
any such thing." He's saying, "You can't call me a Holocaust
denier just... just because I say nobody was gassed at
Auschwitz, because nobody was gassed at Auschwitz."

AIH: "...because I'm telling the truth."

DDG: Exactly.

AIH: Yeah.

DDG: And of course because of the fact the burden of
proof is on the defendant, it's a kind of legal jujitsu, in
which she has to prove he is wrong. He doesn't have to prove
that he's right.

AIH: So this, in a sense, really is the Holocaust on
trial.

DDG: Yes, it is.

AIH: Tell me about ... what you can about the other
characters in the case. Her lawyer... David Irving is
representing himself.

DDG: David Irving is representing himself. He's what they
call a litigant in person. On the other side of the courtoom
is rather more crowded because there's Deborah Lipstadt's
solicitors, and the most notable of those is Anthony Julius,
who may be known to some of your listeners as Princess
Diana's divorce lawyer. He's also the author of a scholarly
book on T.S. Eliot and anti-Semitism. And then there are
lawyers for Penguin Books, who are the publisher. And then
there's a QC, who does the actual cross-examination --
Richard Rampton, who's a very colourful man.

AIH: And their job is to prove the Holocaust and the
details...

DDG: Well, they keep saying that isn't their job.

AIH: No?

DDG: They keep saying their only job is to show that
Irving suppressed, twisted or distorted evidence. But then
you have to ask yourself, "Oh?, evidence about what?" And if
he hadn't suppressed, twisted or distorted it, "What would
it tell us?"

AIH: OK.

DDG: So. There's a way in which both sides are kind of,
to my mind, colluding in this kind of illusion that history
has nothing to do with this trial; that it's only about what
happened in David Irving's study. But, in fact, as everyone
seems to agree, they have to show... if they want to show
that he's ... that he's wrong, they have to show that it
happened, that he had evidence that it happened and ignored
it.

AIH: And, they have to have convincing evidence...

DDG: That's right.

AIH: Yeah. So what are they?...

DDG: Which they have amassed; they have amassed an
enormous amount of evidence. I mean, in addition to Prof.
Van Pelt, who, by the way, didn't only give testimony, he
also submitted a report of several hundred pages,
specifically, about the evidence for Auschwitz. Today
there's Prof. Browning, who's submitted a very lengthy
report on the evidence for the systematic nature of the
Final Solution. They'll also hear evidence from Peter
Longren (sp?), who's a historian at the University College
in London, about the organization of the Final Solution and
the Nazi hierarchy and also about Hitler's involvement in
the Final Solution. So there's a parade of world-class
historians as expert witnesses.

AIH: The judge -- 'cause this is not a jury trial...

DDG: That's right.

AIH: Who is the judge who has to make this decision?

DDG: His name is Charles Gray, Mr. Justice Gray. He's
only been a judge for 18 months. But before that he was one
of the most eminent libel lawyers in Britain. He runs a very
tight trial. In other words, if he feels that witnesses are
straying he will bring them back to the point. It does
provide a distorted picture, though, from the press box,
because most of the press won't have seen any of these
reports; nobody who's sitting in the public gallery will
have seen any of these reports. The judge will see a report;
for example, the judge will have read Browning's report.
Browning will come into court, he'll be sworn in, and then
Irving will start cross-examining him. In other words,
Rampton won't lead him through his report. So all you'll see
if you're sitting in the public gallery or if you're sitting
in the press box, is, whether or not, Irving is able to
attack the witness' credibility. You don't get what the
witness' actual testimony is because it's in these written
reports.

AIH: And, and... How is he doing, as you watch it?

DDG: Well. That kind of grows out of what I just said
because I think Irving is operating on two tracks. One track
is... he's trying to prosecute a libel case -- and, clearly,
you know -- if he wins this case, it will be a huge victory
for him and for revisionists. And even if he wins it on a
technicality, they will make a great deal of it. On the
other hand, if he loses it, he will probably have to go
bankrupt to pay the other side's cost. But it's also true
that he will carry on and he will say what he's saying, but
his mainstream credibility will be destroyed. In other
words, he will no longer be able to face in both directions.
He will only face in the direction of Nazi revisionists or
the fans of Adolf Hitler, the kind of people who collect
Nazi memorabilia -- things like that. He will not have a
mainstrwam audience anymore. So. That's the trial track. But
the other track, which Irving is conducting as well, is this
kind of... he's got this captive audience of the world's
press, and he's making the most of it. He's conducting a big
public teach-in on revisionism. I would say that on that
track he's not doing badly. I don't mean that he's
persuading me, but I mean that he's making the most of his
opportunities. He is not an idiot; he's an intelligent man;
he's not a clown; and his arguments are serious and they
come across, on the surface, as plausible. The defence will
obviously try and probe below the surface -- and, certainly,
with the judge, I think, they're doing that with great
effect. But in terms of the public and the press, I think
it's much more of a mixed bag.

AIH: Which is, of course, the risk in these trials. I
remember when Ernst Zuundel was prosecuted in Canada, there
was a huge debate, even in the Jewish community, about
whether it was... it made any sense to pursue this trial
because it gave a platform to the views of people who they
thought were dangerous.

DDG: That's right! I've read part of the transcript of
the Zundel trial and Irving... this is much less of a
circus. The judge has a much tighter control on the trial
and, in an odd way, even though Irving isn't the defendant
-- I mean, that's the other main difference -- he's not the
defendant.

AIH: They had no choice in this one.

DDG: Right! They had no choice. So they have to defend
themselves. But they're doing it in a much more
well-organized way. There's... I wasn't at the Zundel trial,
but if you read the transcripts, there's a kind of chaotic
quality -- you can't believe this is being allowed to happen
... in the way that some of the witnesses were treated, in
the abusive nature of some of the questioning. Irving is not
like that. He is not an abusive questioner. He has not
been... He's very politely accused witnesses of lying and
faking evidence, but it;s been very polite.

AIH: You've actually met him outside the courtroom, too,
haven't you?

DDG: Yes. I've interviewed him a couple of times. A
couple of times in person and a couple of times by
phone.

AIH: What was that like?

DDG: Uh. Bizarre. He's, as I've said before, intelligent.
He makes an effort to be -- at least with me -- personable.
Uh... He likes to shock you, or try and shock you, but yut
get the sense that partways, at least, when he's not in
court, it's a kind of game for him. It is also true that
there's an almost hypnotic quality to the way that he has an
explanation for everything. You know, if you say to him,
"Well, what happened?" In other words, one of the big piles
of evidence for the Final Solution is the fact that we know
that there were all these people sent by train to places
like Auschwitz and Belzec and Sobibor -- and then we never
heard from them again.

AIH: Yeah...

So, You know, you say, "Well, what happened? Where did
the Jews go - if they were exterminated?" And he'll give you
this rap about how some of them went to Israel and some of
them went to the United States. And, you're listening and
you're thinking, "Well... I dunno...could be..." And it's
only afterwards you realize that it's... it;s insane, that
it, you know, basically, implies that Jews are not like
other people; they wouldn't seek out their families after
the war, you know...

AIH: ...Wouldn't get in touch with anybody.

DDG: Exactly. But, while he's telling you it, it
definitely has a kind of surface plausibility.

AIH: Yeah... From the very beginning, there have been
disputes about things like The Numbers. In part, that's one
of the issues at dispute here. How important is it-- whether
there were 6 million or 5.1 million or many hundreds of
thousands?

DDG: Well, that depends on... Well, the difference
between 6 million and many hundreds of thousands is an order
of magnitude, so that's pretty important. And again, you
have to look at The Why -- not on the sort of "on what
grounds?" -- but The Why. The point of minimizing the
numbers for revisionists -- if you take them at their own
label -- is to, and Irving is very explicit about this, is
to say that, "Well, all wars are dirty; and there were lost
of crimes in World War Two; there are lots of innocents
killed; and that the Germans killed hundreds of thousands of
Jews, but the Americans killed hundreds of thousands of
Japanese, the British killed, you know, tens, hundreds of
thousands of Germans in fire-bombing Dresden and Hamburg and
Pforzheim. So, really, you know, nobody's worse than anybody
else. It;s this kind of what Deborah Lipstadt called "false
equivalency." And that's really their goal. Whether it
matters that 5.1 million or 6 million were killed, I think
it matters a great deal because I think facts always
matter.

AIH: Thank you very much, Mr. Guttenplan.

DDG: Thank you.

AIH: I hope we'll talk again.

DDG: OK. Bye-bye.

AIH: Bye-bye.

D.D. Guttenplan is writing
a book about the Irving libel trial. His feature-length
article on the subject appears in the February issue of
Atlantic Monthly. Mr. Guttenplan spoke to us from
London.

Suggestion: Did this journalist accurately reflect the
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